


The End Is Where We Start From

by Sophia_Prester



Category: Princess Tutu
Genre: F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-23
Updated: 2007-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:41:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1627205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophia_Prester/pseuds/Sophia_Prester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Writing the end to someone else's tale is a terrible responsibility.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End Is Where We Start From

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Aishuu for beta and sounding-board duties.
> 
> Written for KelseyML

 

 

In the months since Mytho and Rue had flown off together into whatever happy ending awaited them, Fakir had written the ending to Ahiru's story no less than fifty times. Every morning, they would leave Karon's house together. He carried paper, pen, ink, and a light lunch in a leather satchel slung over one shoulder, his lap desk was tucked under one arm, and Ahiru rode comfortably in the crook of the other. 

Once at the lake, she would hop out of his arms and waddle to the end of the dock. From there, she would more fall than jump in the water, little wings flapping desperately but making no headway against gravity.

In the water, though, she betrayed none of the clumsiness she betrayed on land. She swam the way Rue used to dance, with an ease that made it look as if she expended no effort at all.

"Don't worry," he always told her. "It will all work out."

Then she would look up at him, and quack softly. He liked to think she was telling him she trusted him, but he couldn't be sure. Her quacks and squawks were expressive, but not as much as he might have wished. 

So, he would toss her some of the bread crumbs he had brought with him, and he would set about writing the ending to her story.

Fifty times. Fifty different endings. None of which were ever put on paper.

He had transformed her with a kiss, a wish, a dance. He had woken up one morning to find a redheaded girl, blushing and confused, lying in bed next to him. She rose up from the water, perfectly human, with Tutu's grace in Ahiru's body. She shook her wings back like a cloak, revealing a human form. She rose up slowly, beak shortening and softening into expressive lips and a freckled nose, feathers falling in a soft, slow rain around her.

He had told himself stories about writing that last story, and had lived through the anxiety of waiting to see if the story would overwrite reality as it had before, pulling everything into its perfect, tidy wake.

Each ending was perfect, he told himself. The prince had his princess, and it was only fair that the knight would have his lady. It was tidy. It was symmetrical. Drosselmeyer would have approved--if only from a technical standpoint, seeing as the old bastard seemed to think that a tidy ending left as many corpses on stage as possible.

He tapped his pen on the edge of the inkwell, but never dipped it in the ink.

Maybe, he thought, the trouble was that he had come up with so many variations on the same ending (there was always a kiss) that it now seemed like a horrible clich, even though not a single word had made it onto paper.

"I wish you could tell me you what you wanted," he always said, and although the sentiment was plaintive, the tone was always snappish, and the little duck who kept him company would quack indignantly and swim off to the middle of the pond.

He always pictured a very human face, cheeks puffed out and the flush of annoyance washing out a scattering of freckles, when she did that. She should have been stalking off stiff-legged rather than swimming away gracefully.

One day, he was dismayed to see that Ahiru was not the only duck at the pond. A flock showed up out of nowhere, and Ahiru had shown no hesitation about swimming off to join them.

He hadn't had a chance to snarl at her and hear her quack back at him that he was being an idiot. He didn't even get to tell her that everything was going to be all right.

One of the ducks, apparently of the opinion that the addition of a newcomer had turned a gathering into a crowd, swam off at high speed, wings pounding the water and legs churning until it seemed it was running along the surface of the water. Before he knew it, wings were pounding air, not water, and the duck flew away.

Ahiru reared up in the water, half-fledged wings flailing at the air for a moment before she splashed down again. The ripples rocked the other ducks in place, but they did not otherwise seem disturbed. Except for the one who had flown off, they accepted the newcomer as one of their own.

He sat on the edge of the dock, and watched the small flotilla of ducks paddling, bobbing, and diving. He kept a careful eye on one of the smaller ducks, but it was like trying to follow a con artist's hand as he shifted shells around and you could no longer tell which one hid the pea.

Maybe the one who lifted partway up from the water, wings beating furiously, might have been her, but he couldn't be sure. A couple of the other young ducks had been doing much the same thing.

She had become human to save Mytho. That much, he knew. He remembered how awkward she seemed in human form, as if she was always surprised at the length of her legs, or at war with her center of gravity.

Funny, he thought. Mytho had been fixated on Princess Tutu, but even when he had met her in the flesh, Fakir could only think of the princess as something escaped from a story. He had always thought of Ahiru--the girl named Ahiru, that is--as the one who was real, whether she was acting as Princess Tutu or had been turned into a duck for whatever reason.

He should have known better. Maybe that was why every time he tried to touch pen to paper so he could write the words that would turn her human, he couldn't.

With Mytho, Fakir had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could keep him safe. He had sheltered Mytho, told him what to do. Fakir told himself that as long as Mytho was safe, dancing would be enough to make his life meaningful and complete. 

Ahiru--even when she was still a duck with no idea that becoming human was even possible--had known at once that was no kind of life at all. She had given everything she was, everything she wanted, for him to be free.

Drosselmeyer had nearly destroyed them all to come up with an ending he thought would be satisfying. 

Who was to say that turning human again was what Ahiru wanted? Who was to say that he was not about to her was any better than what Drosselmeyer had done to her, to him, to the entire city?

Fakir dropped the pen and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth as the bile rose up from his throat.

How dare he? How _dare_ he?

She had become human for Mytho's sake, not his, (and when had he started to assume that when--if--she became human, she would end up with him?) and that job was done.

She loved to dance, he told himself, desperately searching for a way excuse his almost-actions. She had danced as a duck, true, but how much easier in a human body?

A human body that she never could quite coordinate, a dark quiet voice reminded him. It also reminded him of the perfect leaps he could execute as a dancer, and how the thrill of being up in the air, unfettered, could only last a few seconds.

Ahiru had only begun to test her wings. What gave him the right to take that away from her? 

She had friends, he remembered. Those two chatty girls who always seemed to confuse Ahiru with their antics. She had to miss them, right? Even if she wanted nothing to do with them, she would want them back in her life. She had to.

But now he could no longer tell which duck was Ahiru. He could identify a few who were _not_ , but she had blended so seamlessly into the group it was as if she'd always been there. Who was to say there weren't two little ducks out there who wondered where their friend had gone to for all those months, maybe fearing she had been taken by a pike or a fox?

Fakir watched the ducks feed and squabble. He picked up his pen once more.

He could feel a few tendrils from Mytho's story still out there, un-tethered. It was finally time to tie them off. At last he knew how.

Fakir stared at the paper for a moment, then scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. It was a simple ending, as much a clich as any other ending he'd thought up for her. 

_As for the duck who had given up what she was to help the prince, ..._

He stopped, but the pen pulled hard at his hand, nearly turning the comma after "prince" into a dash. This was the right ending, but he had no idea what would happen. Maybe Ahiru would fly off, just as Mytho and Rue had (a tidy and symmetrical ending), leaving him alone to finish off the tale.

Which he had better do, hadn't he? A few more words, and it would all be over.

_...she lived happily every after._

"There," he snarled, tossing the pen aside. It landed in the lake with a splash. He scowled out at the ducks as the story shifted and settled into place. He didn't even need to write "The End."

It was over. For better or worse, it was over. The ducks bobbed on the lake. Fakir once again scrubbed at his eyes.

And so, he completely missed what happened next. There was a squawk and an almighty splash. He looked up, startled, just in time to see dozens of ducks scrambling into the air.

If he thought she had left without saying goodbye, it was for less than a second; as soon as he looked at the water, he knew exactly who was splashing and spluttering and kicking up an unholy fuss. 

With a shout Fakir tossed the story aside and jumped right into the lake. It didn't matter that he was fully clothed, or that he looked ungainly and uncoordinated as he tried to run through the hip-deep water. By the time he got to Ahiru, the water was up to his neck. She was no longer floundering--she was, after all, always comfortable in the water--but that didn't stop her from clinging onto him as if he'd gotten to her as she was about to go under for the third time.

Her dripping bangs almost covered her eyes, but Fakir could see two furious glints of blue all the same.

"I kept trying to tell you to turn me human again! What is it with you?! You never listen!"

"I don't speak duck!" Even though she was clutching on to him so tightly he feared for his collarbone, he held her as if she might disappear at any second. This wasn't the ending he imagined. But the again, it was also the ending he'd imagined fifty times. It certainly wasn't the ending he deserved. "How was I to know--"

She let go of him long enough to scythe one hand through the water, sending a spray of water right against the side of his face.

"You idiot!"

"I gave you happily ever after," he protested, wide-eyed and indignant. In the back of his mind, he felt something shift and move as the first lines of new story laid themselves down.

"You could have waited until we were back at Karon's!" said the very wet and very naked girl in his arms. She looked like she couldn't tell if she was going to yell or cry or laugh. "What took you so long?"

Hold on... he was supposed to wait, but then she yells at him for taking too long? Fakir tried to make sense of that, but in the end sighed and shook his head. Only Ahiru...

"You're being silly," he said. He sounded as cranky as he ever did, but he found that he could not stop smiling. Ahiru's brows drew together and he knew she was about to start yelling at him again. "Look, I have a blanket up on the dock--let's get you covered up and get you home."

She still clung to him as he trudged back to the dock. He thought she might be crying. The pages of the story floated around the pilings, their ink dissolving into the water, but Fakir ignored them. That story was over. 

"I told you it would all work out," he told her.

"You did." Her face was pressed against her neck, but he thought he could feel her smiling through the tears.

"Happily ever after," he whispered. It was a clich. It was almost a joke. But it was also the best thing he had ever written. 

 


End file.
